(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) Assistant Law Professor Brandon Hasbrouck wrote in an article, “The Antiracist Constitution,” that the current United States Constitution must be abolished and replaced because it “serves white supremacy.”
Hasbrouck claimed that the Constitution, despite its original purpose of upholding white supremacy, can support antiracist goals by treating people according to their skin color, RedState reported.
“The Reconstruction Congress gave us the tools in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to apply color-conscious remedies to historic inequities and build an abolition democracy,” he wrote.
Hasbrouck works at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, published the article in the Boston University Law Review in February 2022.
In a footnote to the so-called academic publication, he wrote, “Black Lives Matter.”
Hasbrouck argues that the colorblind Constitution hurts blacks and other minorities. In other words, he asserts that equality under the law—a foundational principle for republican government—supports white supremacy.
“In recent years, some of the most egregiously racist cases have involved the Court resting on constitutional colorblindness to establish why it will not attempt to deal in reasoning or remedies focused on race,” he wrote.
“To advocates of this sort of colorblindness, an ideal society would make no distinction whatsoever on the basis of race, and we should endeavor to reach such a state,” he continued.
Those who believe in the original understanding of the Constitution employ “the rhetorical weaponization of colorblindness.”
The article also rehashed trite arguments about Thomas Jefferson’s ownership of slaves and the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the federal government to return escaped slaves to their masters in the South.
Hasbrouck misrepresented the Three-Fifths Compromise as a plan to “entrench disproportionate power for slaveholding states in Congress and in presidential elections.”
Recognizing that Southern blacks did not have rights as citizens, the North negotiated the Three-Fifths Compromise to limit the power of slaveholding states.
